Roger Ailes Made America What It Is Today

Roger Ailes, the former chairman and CEO of Fox News who presided over its ascendance from cable package throw-in to the bile-spewing behemoth of right-wing media that it is today, is dead at 77. Ailes was a tremendously powerful man who did more during his lifetime than perhaps any other living person to shape the parameters of modern political discourse, and today the world is a better place without him.

Ailes cut his teeth working on the successful presidential campaigns of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, but he didn't become a household name until after he launched the Fox News Channel in 1996 in cooperation with Rupert Murdoch. Over the ensuing two decades, Ailes's creation seamlessly transformed itself into the conservative media outlet of record, willingly serving as an uncritical mouthpiece that helped to legitimize whatever message the Republican Party's latest flavor-of-the-month ideologue hoped to transmit to the masses.

In a development that came as a surprise to exactly no one, Ailes's career was undone by a bevy of repulsive sexual-harassment allegations brought by current and former female Fox News employees, a spectacle that ended with him quietly resigning in lieu of termination in 2016. Simply because there are so many of them, it's difficult to choose any one anecdote to highlight: Megyn Kelly accused him of harassing her during her early days at the network, while Gretchen Carlson recorded him casually opining that the two of them "should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago." After Carlson, Kelly, and others came forward, more women with whom Ailes had crossed paths during his pre-Fox News days revealed eerily similar stories: among them, a woman who says Ailes declined to hire her after she refused to give him a blowjob in the back of a car; a job hopeful who Ailes reportedly told would have to sleep with him and his friends if she expected to have a career in TV; and a 16-year-old girl who Ailes, while reclining on a couch at the end of a long workday, allegedly called into his office and commanded to kiss his genitals.

What Ailes did in private to ruin these women's lives is despicable. What he did in public to shape the ways people in this country talk about politics and think about the world will be the most impactful and most shameful element of his legacy. Roger Ailes constructed a media juggernaut by convincing millions of Americans that a faceless, monolithic Liberal Media bogeyman was trying to infiltrate their homes and corrupt their values and erode their liberties. He reframed casual bigotry as unapologetic patriotism, and then cast that unapologetic patriotism as the exclusive domain of Fox News. His programming reassured viewers that any longstanding prejudices to which they might cling were, in fact, perfectly reasonable sides of a legitimate debate, and that their social condemnation was not a curt rejection by the marketplace of ideas, but was instead an undemocratic incursion on their free speech rights by the rabid, intolerant left.

When the facts did not support whatever conclusions he wished to draw, Ailes remained unbothered. For years, his on-air foot soldiers had no problem systematically manipulating and misrepresenting facts at best—and cheerfully repeating outright lies at worst—in order to find ways to boost their sagging narrative. Ailes cloaked himself in the costume of a newsman in order to establish credibility, but he was, at heart, an uncompromising ideologue for whom reporting news was important only for so long as that news was comprised of things he wanted to hear. When the stories of the day are deemed inconvenient for the advancement of Fox News' agenda, its talent has no problem shutting its eyes and ears tightly and pretending that the outside world does not exist.

It is this unapologetic disregard for anything resembling objectivity that has made Ailes' network into the go-to propaganda outlet for Donald Trump, and the reason he is our president. No matter how spectacularly his administration appears to be imploding at any given moment, Trump knows that he can find a sympathetic ear at Fox News, and that whatever sweet nothings he whispers to Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson or (formerly) Bill O'Reilly will be parroted verbatim and beamed into households across the country, the same bundle of the White House's typically dishonest spin, but this time insidiously propped up by the imprimatur of journalism.

"Ailes was a serial predator who amassed a veritable fortune preying on the worst fears and most deely-held insecurities of millions. He is one of the primary reasons that America is a darker, uglier, and more sharply divided place than it has been in decades."

Do you have close friends or family members who are Fox News devotees? I certainly do. (Call it Roger's Law: Any family of white people, no matter how small or close-knit, will have at least one Bill O'Reilly true believer within two generations.) Talking with them about things other than the upcoming baby or the next reunion used to be a frustrating experience, but at least for a while, those conversations were still happening, even if they started and ended with the same polite disagreement. Now, the languages we use to speak about the world have become so wildly different that we can barely speak at all. Ideological media bubbles are not unique to conservative circles, but the singular dominance of Fox News in that sphere—the loyalty it commands, to the exclusion of all competing points of view—has made it the most culpable contributor to the polarization of this country, a trend we so frequently lament in general terms that it's easy to forget that many of the parties who brought it about have been hiding in plain sight all along.

The concept of grave-dancing makes me uncomfortable, because for as long as hateful people walk the earth and/or the Internet exists, there will be gleeful celebrations upon the death of anyone who is remotely controversial, and many who are not. But Ailes was a serial predator who amassed a veritable fortune preying on the worst fears and most deeply-held insecurities of millions. He is one of the primary reasons that America is a darker, uglier, and more sharply divided place than it has been in decades. The empire he created enables our aspiring authoritarian president, carries water for the forces that propelled him to that position, and gives life to archaic ideas that should have been left for dead in civil society long ago.

In the on-air eulogy he delivered on Thursday morning, a somber Sean Hannity gushed, "Few people in this life will ever reach the profound level of impact that Roger Ailes had on the country every single day." For once, he's absolutely right.